Joanna Lumley: If you receive undeserved praise, you have to expect undeserved blame

Joanna Lumley has been experiencing the fickleness of public esteem this week.

Joanna Lumley has championed the right of all Gurkhas to live in Britain

By Peter Stanford

9:36PM BST 23 Sep 2011

From being lionised as the national treasure and campaigner par excellence who forced the Labour government into a rethink on allowing Gurkhas to settle in Britain, she is now the target of an angry Facebook campaign, “Lumley’s Legacy”. Launched by residents of Aldershot and Farnborough, it blames her for “----ing up” their towns by paving the way for a “massive influx” of Gurkhas.

“If you receive undeserved praise,” she reflects on this reversal of fortune with a typical stiff upper lip, “then you have also to expect undeserved blame”. But 65-year-old Lumley, who has just arrived home from filming the new series of Absolutely Fabulous, is clearly not about to let such criticism compromise by one iota her support for the Gurkhas. “There is a terrible problem in these towns. I live here in Stockwell, south London, where people come from all parts of the world and all colours of the rainbow, and everyone is comfortable with each other. What I hadn’t expected was that in these garrison towns [and she speaks as the daughter and great-granddaughter of soldiers] there would be such a hateful, xenophobic reaction. The bitter irony is that, if these protesters ever went to Nepal, where the Gurkhas come from, they would receive the warmest welcome and the best of everything from some of the poorest people in the world.”

Some estimates put at 9,000 the number of Gurkha veterans and their families who have settled in Aldershot, making them one in 10 of the town’s population. The online protesters claim they are placing “a huge drain” on local services, not least by requiring translators to accompany them to appointments with doctors and dentists. “I know that there is a snarl-up with money at the moment,” Lumley responds, “and that public funds are scarce, but this has to be made to work by more resources being provided. It should have happened long ago. The Government cannot just make a decision to let the Gurkhas settle, then throw it in the air and leave it to land wherever. These brave and valiant men have fought alongside us, and for us, for 200 years and we have a duty to make good our promises to them.”

Lumley is about to publish an autobiography – “my third go at my life,” she acknowledges, adding, “I hope I don’t turn into Dirk Bogarde who wrote his 14 times.” It includes the inside story of the Gurkha campaign she spearheaded (though, with trademark modesty, she prefers to describe her role as “assisting”). Her own father, who like generations of his family before him spent his working life in Britain’s colonies, had been an officer in the 6th Gurkha Rifles, so the request for her “assistance” had been impossible to refuse, she says.

Nick Clegg comes out of this account very well indeed, as “chief among [our] staunch allies”. So does Gordon Brown, the then prime minister. His handshake is warm and he doesn’t blink when 150 Gurkhas turn up for tea and cakes at 10 Downing Street after inviting 40. Even David Cameron’s handwritten notes are reproduced, albeit with some key passages tastefully covered by the envelope. Among the qualities that endear Lumley to the public are her old-school good manners, so she can hardly be expected to dish the dirt on foot-dragging ministers. She makes no mention in her book, for example, of possibly the most iconic moment in the whole Gurkha struggle, when she convened an impromptu press conference in the Home Office and appeared to be dictating government policy when the hapless immigration minister, Phil Woolas, was forced to repeat what she was telling him. Was the omission deliberate? “Yes, it was. I didn’t want to go back over it,” she protests, as if it would be like passing on an unpleasant bit of tittle-tattle.

But, surely, the campaign must have given her some insights into how politicians work? “It wasn’t my world and I certainly had a hard time getting them to stick in public to what they had told me in private,” she begins carefully, and then opens up. “That incident with Phil Woolas happened when we had just had a private conversation and he had agreed to what we were asking, in front of three lawyers. But suddenly, when the cameras were there, he didn’t seem to want to repeat what he had just told me. So I did it for him. Sometimes you just have to grab your opportunity.”

A ring on the doorbell of the home she shares with her composer husband of 25 years, Stephen Barlow, interrupts her flow. From the hallway I hear first her appreciative gasps at a large bouquet of flowers that are being delivered (Lumley, please note, answers her own door), and then louder, slightly more hysterical cries from the doorstep when the female courier realises who her customer is. “Isn’t it simply gorgeous,” she says when she returns, “when both of us are made happy. I have some beautiful flowers and that lady was so surprised to see who opened the door.”

Lumley’s absence of celebrity affectations, and her determination to see the best in everything and everyone (save, perhaps, the protesters in Aldershot), are other elements in the public admiration she inspires. How does it feel to be a national treasure? “It is such a charming thing,” she purrs in that voice that famously makes men of my generation go weak at the knees. “I don’t want to sound too falsely modest, but I think it has happened because I have been around for so long. Purdey [her breakthrough role in The New Avengers, complete with the short, tomboyish haircut that still carries the name] was 35 years ago now and I have just kept pitching up in things.” That is one way of describing winning three Baftas, and recently being nominated for a Tony award for her role in La Bete on Broadway.

Behind the charm, though, what shines through most in Lumley is her down-to-earth common sense. The new book makes no bones about the two-line acting jobs she has taken at various stages in her career to pay the bills as a single parent to her son, Jamie. And when she writes of her modelling days, she includes a health-warning about the “harsh public scrutiny” of today’s catwalk queens and the “spiteful punishing of younger public figures” over their appearance which fuels an obsession with dieting and can lead to the epidemic of eating disorders. “When I was doing it you had to be slim and have no spots, but there was none of the hyper-anxiety that surrounds models and beautiful young actresses today. Because everyone has a camera on their mobile phone, they hardly dare step outside the door.”

That is clearly not something that worries Lumley, Facebook campaign or not. “Heavens no. I’m a grandmother [Jamie, a photographer, now has two young daughters]. If people want my photograph, I put my arm around their shoulder, pose and am grateful.”